As I mentioned last week, I started to make some changes to the Xen.org web site and associated sites. The most significant changes are
- The News menu now goes directly to the blog (I will rename the menu later this week), whereas the news feed which was on that page has been moved to the home page.
- There is a new section of the bottom of each page, which links to various community resources. This is just a first cut and I am looking for input as to what you want. Don’t hesitate to get in touch.
- I created a governance section from the approved project governance proposal in preparation for refactoring the Products section of the site into a Project section that contains all developers need.
Changes have only been made to the xen.org site and none of the other sites. This means that there will be a slight mismatch in look and feel between different sites, which I will fix when the changes have settled. There may also be some breakages: please let me know and bear with us, if this is the case,
Making site changes at the Hackathon
I will spend some time at next week’s Hackathon to discuss with whoever has an opinion how to best change the Information Architecture and will start making changes while I am there. My thinking is that the top level navigation should be tailored to Developers (aka the project section), Users and Companies. There is a strong case for keeping a freshed Community section. This work serves as preparation for more significant changes to the Xen.org infrastructre, such as replacing the servers and building a new platform on top of which Xen.org will be run. Much of this is still in the planning stage, but I will be looking for volunteers to help test and influence the design.
Wiki & Docs Squad
My top prioritiy is to fix the wiki. The plan of record is to create a new Wiki based on Mediwiki and to migrate the content that is up-to-date to the new wiki instance and keep the old instance as Read Only. Given that most Wiki content is written by volunteers, a volunteer program – how about the Docs Squad – to identify useful and important pages would be the way to go. This wasn’t actually my idea, but was suggested by a few members of our community who care about the wiki and are annoyed by its current state. The way how I envisage this is to have regular IRC sessions where the Docs Squad gets together on IRC, discusses which pages are important and coordinates migrates the pages. To make sure we can get started quickly, I am signing up volunteers right now. Get in touch.